Portrait of Rapha Maitre

Next to the signature the painter wrote the date, April 1871. That winter Paris had lived through four months of Prussian siege, and since March the city had been run by the Commune. The woman in this canvas stands in a room full of flowers, in a fashionable cream silk outfit edged with lace, looking past a birdcage towards a window we cannot see. She is Rapha, for more than 30 years the companion of Edmond Maître, a music lover and a friend of Renoir and the painter Bazille. The couple never married, and little is known about her beyond her Belgian origin. The room is probably Maître's flat on the rue Taranne, where Renoir had stayed for several weeks in June 1870. Budgerigars sit in the cage, and below it the corner has become a small conservatory, with an arum lily and a crescent of red hyacinths. This full-length portrait stayed with Rapha after her companion died in 1898, and that October she sold it to the dealer Durand-Ruel.